The strange, selective history driving Putin’s war has been exposed – but Trump keeps repeating his lines.
“I think it is not their territory, but the historical territory of Russia,” President Vladimir Putin insists.
He was talking last week about US-facilitated ceasefire negotiations with Ukraine.
But the 74-year-old has an unorthodox viewpoint of history.
He embraces the bits that suit him.
He ignores the bits that don’t.
And rewrites the rest to fit.
It’s all about the good old days.
When Russia was an empire. When surrounding nations were bent to Moscow’s will. When Russkiy lords and ladies ruled over their peasants with an iron fist.
It was when the Russian Orthodox Church was the one true faith.
And world leaders lined up to pay homage to the Kremlin.
But it all went wrong with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
“It was a disintegration of historical Russia,” the Kremlin dictator insists.
“We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1000 years was largely lost.”
Nations like Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine broke free from Russian imperialism. Occupied Poland and East Germany were freed to determine their own fates. Eastern Bloc satellite states such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria had to go it alone.
Mr Putin wants it all back. All at once. With all the other bits of history forgotten.
“Of course, history is never fixed, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has used this to his advantage,” assesses the diplomatic journal Foreign Policy.
“His regime has embarked on a major project to recast the past (and especially the Soviet era) to legitimise its rule, justify the invasion of Ukraine, and market itself as an anti-colonial power to the global south.”
It’s also a useful propaganda tool.
Especially when the President of the United States embraces it.
Short Memories
“Russia would like to get it done,” President Trump insisted at a recent Oval Office press briefing. “Russia is a big machine. They just keep grinding forward, and that’s what they’ve done.”
That’s not the assessment of the world’s military analysts.
But it is a common Kremlin talking point.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reports Ukraine has achieved “operational initiative across the frontline, virtually halting Russian advances”.
It explains Russian troops had gained about 100 square kilometres since January. But a Ukrainian counter-attack over the past few months pushed them back 122 square kilometres.
President Putin’s getting impatient.
He’s always insisted Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”.
That’s despite the independent histories of the region’s ethnic Bulgars, Cossacks, Dacians, Tartars and Ruthenians having led to the development of distinctly separate languages and cultures.
But he’s not the first Russian war lord to think this way.
Soviet chairman Joseph Stalin imposed a deliberate famine upon Ukraine between 1932 and 1933, killing between 3 and 5 million people. The idea behind the genocide was to erase the region’s identity and enable Russian settlers to walk in unopposed.
President Putin believed his forces could capture the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in three days. President Zelensky was supposed to have been seized or killed. And surviving Ukrainian forces were all supposed to surrender within a fortnight.
It didn’t happen that way.
Now, Moscow apparently didn’t want to seize Ukraine anyway.
“People keep talking about a war in Ukraine. That war is about Donbas,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted last week. “It’s about one region of the country.”
That Kremlin talking point emerged only after its ‘special military operation’ extended into its second year. It has become more refined in its fifth.
Moscow’s War on Reality
“The whole of Ukraine is ours,” President Putin asserted at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum last year. He had, at least momentarily, forgotten the Donbas talking point.
“We have a saying, or a parable,” he added. “Where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours.”
But he also has a problem remembering where those feet have been.
And where other feet kicked them out.
Even recently.
But he has a good story to tell.
“The war would have been over in one day,” 80-year-old President Trump recited at a White House press briefing last month.
He had embraced another of the Kremlin’s talking points: That Ukraine did not repulse the 2022 invasion. It had all been an accident.
“This very stupid general … I doubt he’s still with us … He decided to hang a right onto the farmland and then take a left and go up to Kyiv. He ended up getting stuck in the mud.”
Military analysts agree.
Sort of.
They just add that Ukrainian forces deliberately ambushed Russian forces at critical crossroads, bridges and other choke points to force them into the fields.
“The night before they had the heaviest rainfall they’ve had in 10 years, and the land was soaking wet”, President Trump rationalised on Mr Putin’s behalf.
Regional rainfall records do not support this.
But there is another explanation. One that does not suit the Kremlin dictator’s narrative.
Military analysts point to how Ukraine’s historic success was partly due to how its troops deliberately blew open the Kozarovychi Dam north of Kyiv to flood farmland ahead of the onrushing Russian tanks.
Medieval Mindsets
“Today’s Kremlin propaganda seeks to win Western supporters by exploiting their discontents and anxieties,” argues Atlantic Council analyst Adrian Karatnycky.
It’s worked with President Trump.
And France’s aspiring president, Marine Le Pen.
Then there are all the podcasters, social media influencers, and talk-show hosts who have embraced the narrative.
“To the Western cultural right, the Kremlin emphasises Russia’s supposed support for traditional values,” Mr Karatnycky adds. “To global altruists seeking to avert conflict with a nuclear power, the Kremlin offers Ukraine’s capitulation as the price of peace.”
Through both, one principle stands tall:
Might makes right.
“If Putin is permitted to establish the principle of seizing foreign land based on historical claims, the repercussions will shake the global order to its very foundations,” Mr Dickinson adds.
The Kremlin dictator is not the only world leader to take this tack.
China’s Chairman Xi Jinping also insists on “restoring” a lost empire.
Not any particular one. But all of them. All at once. Real and imagined.
Just don’t mention Genghis Khan and his Mongol Horde.
That invasion never happened. It never subjugated two of the three separate cultural dynasties ruling China at the time. And the Yuan dynasty was never Mongolian.
At least, not according to the Chinese Communist Party’s official history.
Likewise, President Putin’s ideal empire is a mashup of those under Ivan the Terrible, Tsar Alexis I (who subjugated Ukraine), Peter the Great, and Catharine the Great (who occupied Crimea).
“Putin believes he is on a historic mission to reverse the Soviet collapse and revive the Russian Empire,” Mr Dickinson concludes. “Western leaders must speak to Putin in the language of strength and convince him that his unhinged dreams of colonial conquest have no place in the twenty-first century.”